Smartphones, tablets and other compact electronic devices are extremely widespread and people are increasingly relying upon these devices for a choice of purposes. Cellular phone market is huge and the potential is great especially in a smartphone segment of the market. Worldwide sales of mobile phones to end users reached 419 million units in the second quarter of 2012, according to Gartner, Inc. report when smartphone sales accounted for 36.7 percent of total mobile phone sales and grew 42.7 percent in the second quarter of 2012, according to that report. Vendors shipped 153.9 million smartphones in 2012 compared to 108.3 million units in 2011. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, vendors will ship a total of nearly 1.8 billion mobile phones in 2012, compared to 1.7 billion units shipped in 2011. By the end of 2016, IDC forecasts 2.3 billion mobile phones will be shipped to the channel with 12.7% year-over-year annual growth from 2012 till 2016. In terms of the tablet market, IDC has revised their forecast for the worldwide tablet market, suggesting that global shipments are projected to reach 107.4 million units this year, 137.4 million in 2013, and 222.1 million by 2016.
In recent years, smartphones have been used in more and more situations, and along with this, information to be displayed on a display has become various. Therefore, the size of a screen of the display has been increased. However, since the size of the screen of the display is limited by the size of the display, there is a limitation in a number of smartphone uses. This makes it rather difficult to enjoy surfing the net, watching TV, playing an online video game or viewing some sort of multimedia presentation.
As a result there is a strong need for a multi-display device solution to meet the needs of today's advanced mobile uses.
There are a number of multi-screen devices currently announced to the market.
China Union Branch has announced the development of a smartphone-tablet combo very similar to the ASUS Padfone. The TransPhone is a device that has a flat panel display with a dock for a smartphone on its back side.
Echo phone by Kyocera provides a dual-screen phone with Android OS, wherein a pair of displays are coupled to each other, such that both the displays are provided with respective image display surfaces, thereby enabling both the image display surfaces to offer larger amounts of information to users.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2011/0007465 by Naito of Kyocera discloses a dual-screen device that includes a first display and a second display connected so that they can move relative to each other.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2012/0188726 by Nonaka of Kyocera discloses a portable electronic apparatus includes coupled first and second displays with respective image display surfaces. Similar devices were also disclosed by Jones in U.S. Patent Application 20110143769 and in U.S. Patent Application 20110001687 by Srinivasan.
Unlike the abovementioned prior art, the present invention provides a detachable device with three displays in the preferred embodiment of the invention with an angle of opening of up to 360 degrees.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2012/0223872 titled: “Multiple Monitor Display Apparatus” by Ram discloses a multiple monitor apparatus in the form of a laptop PC, a desktop monitor, a mobile device, or the like. In dual-screen mode, the user sits centered between the two monitors. In single-screen mode, the additional display enclosure(s) are retracted and stored in such a manner that they do not present themselves to the user. A guiderail assembly is used to center both display enclosures relative to the user.
Samsung reportedly has filed a U.S. Patent Application for a folding cell phone with flexible AMOLED display, using the YOUM-type AMOLED display. Samsung's display does not consist of any glass, and it is comprised of TFT film layer, an Encap film layer, and a polarizer. The Samsung flexible display technology is different from our invented technology. It also has a number of disadvantages, since only part of the Samsung device could be flexible since there are a number of hard parts that must be in every cell phone device.
With respect to the detachable aspect of the present invention, there are a number of currently available detachable devices, such as the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid that features a detachable screen, enabling the device to switch between laptop and tablet PC modes. There are no detachable multi-screen devices with three or more display parts enabling the device to switch between smartphone and tablet states. PadFone 2 from Asus presents a detachable device, when detaching is performed while docking the phone into or pulling it out of the PadFone Station.
With regard to the self-charging aspect of the invention, U.S. Patent Application Publication 2010/0045241 by Nousiainen of Nokia discloses a self-charging cellphone battery, called Piezoelectric Kinetic Energy Harvester. It discloses a battery that's mounted in a larger frame and isolated from it by piezoelectric elements. Thus, kinetic energy generated by movement is used to produce electricity to “at least partially recharge the device battery.”
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2009/0021214 by Foster titled: “Portable electronic device carrier with charging system” discloses a charger for a portable electronic device comprising a carrier and a charging system, the charging system comprising photovoltaic cells configured to convert light into electricity and a battery configured to be charged by electricity generated by the photovoltaic cell(s).
A new development from the UCLA Materials Science department presents a phone LCD display that is made of two polarized transparent sheets which sandwich the liquid crystal molecules that form pixels. Only a small part of the back light goes through the pixels and over 75 percent of the light energy gets absorbed in the polarizing sheets. The researchers led by Professor Yang Yang employ an organic photovoltaic polarizer that would convert the light from the back light into electricity to charge the phone battery. See also http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/15/photovoltaic-cells-in-lcds-could-recycle-wasted-and-ambient-light/
Bosch Solar Energy produces Solar To Go solution currently suited for Apple iPad that could be downloaded from the Apple's AppStore.
The “Pocket Panel” is a portable solar charger from PortableSolarPower company. It is a Portable Solar USB Charging Panel designed to charge cell phones and other USB devices via their USB port.
Despite the recent developments, there is no device that is completely self-chargeable. Due to the fact that in the invention, the photovoltaic cells will cover up to the entire area of every display element, self-charging becomes more realistic.
With regards to the 3D camera aspect of the invention, Nokia produced a tablet with a 3D camera at the back. The tablet device relies on a dual photo/video sensor. LG Optimus 3D P920 presents another example of a smartphone equipped with dual cameras and 3D Camera features to allow to shoot 3D movies and snap 3D photos via dual cameras—see http://www.lg.com/uk/mobile-phones/lg-P920-optimus-3d. Fujitsu recently presented a 3D adaptor device that uses a series of mirrors to split the field of vision of your phone's camera in two, creating the same sort of stereo separation that's accomplished by a pair of image sensors in proper 3D cameras.